Category: Music

My media player of choice for years has been the Apple TV. I have a Gen 2, Gen 3, and a Gen 4 throughout the house. The combination of the Gen 2 & 3 along with iTunes has been a pretty solid combination for my household. I was pretty psyched for the Gen 4, because all it was missing was apps. I bought the 32GB Apple TV 4 right when it was released and I’ve just never been happy with it. The interface is crap, the remote is crap, and I constantly have to restart it to get it working properly again. I was really hoping that the tvOS update that came last month would have brought tremendous improvements, but it brought nothing that improved my user experience with it.

At this point, I’m ready to try a different media player. One thing that has kept me tied to the Apple stuff was that all my media has been kept in iTunes. I’ve since setup a Plex server and moved all my media over to it and it’s been a pretty impressive experience. Being on a new media server allows me to look at other media players. So I’ve pre-ordered one of the new Roku Ultra‘s.

The new Roku’s officially release October 7th, so I won’t have it until early next week. I will report back once it’s setup with my first impressions.

Independent Unsigned Artists and Bands – Unsigned.com
Unsigned.com is the new voice for independent Artists looking for the chance to be discovered! For bands and solo artists, Unsigned.com provides you with an outlet to be heard by an ever-growing fan and listener base.

Unsigned.com is a website that matches unsigned bands with listeners. Unsigned.com allows registered users to listen to music for free while artists can use the websites to promote and sell their own music. Unisgned.com lets you search for music based on topic. If you hate paying $.99 per song at iTunes (or $.88 per song at Wal-mart) to support â€œthe man,â€ give Unsigned.com a try. Unsigned.com has over 2000 bands signed up, Iâ€™m sure youâ€™ll discover something new.

Next Friday, my wife, a couple friends, and I will be going to the metallica show in Milwaukee. My wife is pretty excited as this will be her first real concert. I’m actually more looking forward to the Godsmack portion. Probably since I’ve seen Metallica quite a few times, or since their last album really stinks it up.

Still should be a good time though. It will be fun being the old person telling all the kids around us to sit down so we can see from our seats!

Update: I’ve got two tickets available. Anyone going to be in Milwaukee on Friday?

I’m trying to figure out the name of a band. Unfortunately I only get to listen to this station in the car, so I can’t check the currently playing area of their website and they never say the name after the song is played.

I can’t tell you much, other than the genre is rock and they sound very similar to AC/DC. And I believe they are a new group.

Any ideas?

Update: I now know what song it is thanks to one of the stations DJ’s I emailed. The group is Jet, and the song in question is called Cold Hard Bitch.

Last weekend tickets went on sale for Metallica for a show in Milwaukee on August 20th. I said I had no intentions of ever seeing Metallica again, since their last album was grueling sucky. However, I realized that my wife has never seen them, or any real concert, for that matter. So I decided I would try to get tickets. Then, while talking with some freinds, they said they have never seen them either and really wanted to.

I ended up ordering 4 tickets. The grand total came close to $300. Dang!

Magnatune is an online music site that does what an online music site should. Artists submit their music directly to the site where anyone can stream hi quality versions. If you like the music and want to but it, you basically pay what you think its worth, and then youï¿½re free to download it in whatever format you wish, including uncompressed wav. 50 percent of the sale then goes directly to the musician.

The site is laid out very intuitively and provides many ways to hear the different genreï¿½s they offer. I’ve already found some really good music on there that I would have never heard otherwise. I havenï¿½t actually bought any music yet, but I think Iï¿½m going to order a couple today.

One of my favorite bands, Dream Theater, has a new album coming out tomorrow. It’s called ‘ Train of Thought‘ and the band has released a free full mp3 download on their site. If you like hard hitting rock, check it out here.

Let me start by saying that they’re be no means my favorite band. They’re actually a little before my time, but they do have some decent ‘classic’ songs. For starters, the show cost 5 bucks, how can you go wrong. The show kicked off promptly at 8:00 which was pretty amazing. Of course those old rockers got to be in bed before 11 so the show wrapped up at probably 10:30ish.

Let me just say, it was a great show. They rocked and didn’t miss a beat. Come Sail Away was by far the best song they performed. And if your wondering, Mr Roboto was part of a melody of songs and only lasted about 15 seconds.

I took about 130 pictures of which maybe 25% are somewhat usable. Because of the slower shutter speed I was running alot of pictures were blurry and quite a few have over exposed elements that ruined the picture. Below is a sampling. This weeked I’ll create a gallery for all the good pictures.